alt Hacker News> extremely well known for catastrophic engine failure
The problem with this is it's a bit hard to put "well known" in a news article about a negative piece of news, because the manufacturers tend to threaten to sue you unless you have some kind of source or some kind of actual numbers. So this ends up just circulating as received wisdom within the car-knower community but not to the general public. Unless they get lucky with Reddit search results.
I noticed today that Autotrader.co.uk have recall warnings for certain cars, though.
This is fair. I should have been more explicit that my wonderment is how something that is gospel in the car guy/mechanic community has somehow completely avoided filtering into the greater consumer discussion with regards to catastrophic failure and reliability.